Evolution

by Saunders, Craig

  The Tradition’s decore was surprisingly light for all their darker overtones (which should of course be undertones but they were so open about them). Others species put the light on the outside to mask the nature within. The Tradition did it the other way around. Their outside face was hard and cold. Inside, they were fluffy valances through and through.

  The Tradition would always have a place in Orpal’s heart. They cared. Even within the brightest holds of the planet-ship it was obvious. The sun’s luminosity (protected and held within a vast field of its own design) shone through the metal, lighting it, like the hidden heart within an amphibian, its skin thin, yet versatile.

  Kyle followed the guestgreeter through careening walkways for two minutes, engaging in small talk, until he was within the outer sphere. The artery emerged directly into the hall of the museum. There had been no sense of movement. Nothing the Tradition did was ever hurried. Even arrival, thought Kyle, was designed to awe. He had to admit, he was impressed.

  The architecture was astounding. Massive curlicues of thurnon ipis carved into sober beasts, reminiscent of the gargoyles favoured by churches that erupted over Kyle’s planet Guron (/subplate tect Rhuna class – Ecentrist), frowned at him. Paintings from various schools of matter adorned each uneven wall. Sculptures in stone glass and organospate broke the monotony of the wide floor, itself a giant mosaic, depicting the planets of the home world of the Tradition (an assumption – they had adopted the system as their own, although Torpa, the Enlightened’s home world, was also of great importance to them), each in relief against the other. Circular areas were raised above his head, the thirma the highest, and in its centre, within a cage, the prize. Laser cannons lounged innocuously from the domed ceiling. Each gargoyle held a stone gun, at rest for the present. Should anyone break the cage they would come to life.

  Sentients of every description were at the exhibition. Other archeofacts were arranged around the halls, some natural (one living, even – the last of its race, an (the, supposed Orpal, seeing through Kyle’s eyes) Urlphan) sat for people’s amusement in a way that Kyle found blasphemous. The Urlphan’s dignity remained evident. A simbot, pottery shards, a phallus, arrow heads, beasts of war, prey…there were far too many for Kyle in all his inexperience to name. The walls of the hall were close at some points, at others they merely reached into the distances. The guestgreeter had told him on the way in that the power of the sun allowed them to warp gates to admit some of the larger artefacts. There were viewing galleries, too, where wormholes were opened and natural forces held at bay, and where visitors could gaze upon immense phenomena through space and even time. This, though, thought Kyle, was enough for one day. He felt dwarfed already. Insignificant. He wondered if his god could do all this. It seemed unlikely. If god had created the whole of the universe, then Kyle should be bowed, for he surely stood in the centre of His eye.

  There was a throng was gathered around a central piece. Kyle, on Orpal’s advice, studied a piece away from the main attraction, with Orpal lecturing him in one ear, the ambassador in the other, while he looked at a sculpture in fossilised matter, too dark for Kyle, skeletal, and entirely boring.

  His attention shifted to a much finer work of art, sleek in the right places, full, like a cantaloupe, in others.

  The ambassador nudged his attention gradually back on track.

  “How long have you known Orpal, Jiall Kyle Iris? If, of course, it is not impolite to judge.”

  Kyle, perplexed, asked, “Judge what?”

  “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Orpal replied (for Kyle, it was exactly like hearing voices, the schizophrenic kind).

  “Well, it’s an interesting association. Orpal is a solitary character, or has been for as long as I have known him.”

  “Really? And how long is that?”

  “Change the subject Kyle…”

  “I believe he first visited us…”

  “HnnzzZZZ!” A pitched whine hit Kyle with all the force of a high-pitched whine, but one that began inside the ears.

  “Fuck’s sake!”

  “Now, now Kyle, don’t sulk.”

  “I’m not fucking sulking, that hurt!”

  “Yeah, well, it was quicker than saying ‘mind your own business’.”

  “Is something wrong?” Worry was etched on the guestgreeter’s face, looking down at Kyle where he had fallen to one knee. Many of the museum’s patrons had turned to look at him. He had stolen the limelight.

  He favoured them with a wry smile and gratefully took the guestgreeter’s proffered arm as he stood, shaking his head.

  “No, no. Just a bout of sciatica.”

  “Hmm. How sad in one so young.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve been about.”

  The guestgreeter, taking Kyle’s bare, scarred arm, had noticed.

  “I don’t doubt it. Come,” said the guestgreeter, turning away.

  “How did you get the piece? A coup, surely?” Kyle enquired, rubbing his ear for want of a better place to rub, and scowling.

  “We have long been allies with the Ecentrists, Jiall Kyle Iris. But, yes, we are proud and delighted to be able to show it. You know, it is the oldest manufactured artefact in all of creation?”

  “Wow. That’s great,” said Kyle, still fuming quietly on the inside at Orpal. The great lecturer, he sneered. For all his ramblings he was no better than the missionaries had been. It was still preaching, no matter that Orpal called it ‘teaching’. At least he’d understood what the missionaries had been talking about and what they wanted from him. Orpal made no sense at all. He’d rather have the lash. Tangible pain. At least the missionaries had stayed out of his head.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, you know,” said Kyle easily, scratching at his long hair where the eargen hid. Ignoring the question, he added, “I was wondering…the piece is travelling, and, well, why has someone else got the Ecentrists prized piece of the emitter?”

  The hologen stared out of its eyes at Kyle. It was obvious from its demeanour that it didn’t like being ignored, but at the risk of pissing off the ship…Kyle stopped that thought. He was going to piss the ship off plenty in time. He didn’t suppose the feelings of the evening’s ambassador mattered much.

  Someone barged past him, nudging Kyle’s elbow just after a drone handed out drinks.

  He looked around for the drone, but it was hovering on the other side of the room.

  The guestgreeter was greeted by a fifth-level being, its body held within armour which it needed to hold its mass solid, who tapped it on the arm as it passed, granting a smile made of slime and interrupting, not rudely. The outer film held the form together – its race had been bordering on extinction seventy-two thousand years ago.

  (Orpal was also giving a running commentary in his ear while Kyle was trying to concentrate on the conversation with the guestgreeter: An interesting species; due to their habit of merging…their complete being composed loosely of lower ambiotic forms which had a love for each other that bordered on blasphemy…the form could not support the addition of other individuals, having a breaking mass where too many mergings had left the race diluted. In an entirely sociological evolution the race had realised its own nature would be its downfall, and in effect limited its mergings. The reason for their being was the merging. Now they look like they’re in a cage of their own making, imprisoning themselves purely to continue in existence…)

  “Shut up, Orpal, and leave me alone. Fucking sadist.”

  The guestgreeter had turned back to him and was talking, although Kyle had failed to catch the first part of the sentence, he felt sure the ambassador had returned to his earlier question. “…the Ecentrists don’t believe the Tradition are a threat. They believe the Lore are an abomination as they absorb and imitate others…”

  Orpal spoke into his head again and he lost concentration. “Alright, it was just a slap, calm down.”

  “It always starts with a slap. Don’t do it again. Ever.”


  “Point taken,” Orpal conciliated, huffiness evidence through the light spectrum.

  *

  Cablas – Outer Sphere

  The guestgreeter (thinking to itself ‘what a gump’ as it became increasingly obvious that Kyle was ignoring it) persisted with its job. Duty was hardwired into it, but it was a struggle to override its creator-given gift of free will and stay with the scarred man. Perhaps in the next galaxy Cablas graced with the exhibit there would be more fifth level beings. This galaxy was backward. The conjurel, in so far as it had original thoughts, wished for more interesting company.

  It was, however, tasked to at least seem to find its charges interesting. It tried everything to engage him, finally resorting to fluttering eyelashes after all attempts at conversation failed miserably.

  Orpal laughed, watching the Tradition’s representative trying its hardest to engage with Kyle, who, Orpal supposed, girls might find attractive, but did nothing for him personally. No doubt it had been told to make his visit a pleasant one.

  Kyle wondered if he could make an anagram out of guestgreeters and could only think of gusset greeter. Instead of getting involved in a conversation he didn’t want with the guestgreeter he was studiously ignoring it.

  He liked the ship, though. It was like home.

  The archeog, Cablas, was the Tradition’s star ship. Over 16 million artefacts, each of a different society. Each artefact, commonly referred to as archeofacts, came from some defunct or insecure society, which asked the Tradition to hold something for safekeeping. It could have felt like a graveyard aboard the ship, for so many artefacts, even in passing, that Kyle saw were from dead societies. The Tradition would only display when asked. Kyle wondered how many other societies died with nothing left to remember them. When he killed, he always took a trophy. It was the hunter’s job to remember the kill.

  Cablas remembered all the gone, even though it wasn’t a hunter like him. He understood that.

  He didn’t linger on the dark for long. He scanned the crowd for the woman with the cantaloupe-behind he had seen earlier, narrowing his eyes, while the representative rambled. Looking around he saw wild, random biology, the stark mechanism of the Tradition, Ecentrist gargoyles with their feinted religiosity, toned down in deference to their hosts.

  There. There she was. Kyle watched the woman slink from the corner of his eye. He was desperately trying to concentrate on her, looking without looking all the while giving the pretence of listening to the conjurel projection.

  It seemed there was something wrong with the droids head; she kept flicking her hair now, occasionally catching his cheek with random strands of light given weight by the gravity booster contained within her conjurel unit. He tried to ignore her and concentrated on his prey.

  The archeofacts around him bled insignificantly into the background as he watch her walking across the room. She was unaware he was looking at her. How, he couldn’t imagine. A woman like that would, surely, need eyes in the back of her head. She was wearing armour; definable, malleable, and moulded into evening wear. Despite her best efforts to look erudite, with her body within it her clothing still looked as though it had been scribbled onto her by some lecherous adolescent artist. He couldn’t see her face yet and caught himself leaning stupidly, trying to peer around the sun-kissed auburn hair that fell cascading to her shoulder.

  Finally, his concentration bowed under the weight, he gave in. “Excuse me, ambassador, I have to introduce myself to an old friend…”

  “Of course, Jiall Kyle Iris. I will be around.”

  “That gives me great comfort,” he replied smiling, looking into the projection’s eyes with all the sincerity he could muster, before letting his eyes drift back, everything between him and the woman a translucent shade.

  And, as fortune would have it, she stood next to an alkydrone. Fate was fickle indeed, thought Kyle.

  Her armour was magnificent. Worn like a dress, her ankles and shoulders bare but the rest of her covered. It looked to be holmium. Unknown to Kyle its consciousness resided in the shoulder cannon, which for tonight had been discreetly changed into a shoulder bag. It hung aloof and unaware of how lucky it was next to the curve of her hip. Her back was to him and as he approached he smiled.

  He breathed from his nose as he lent over her, unnecessarily, for a drink. The hunter’s eyes saw her pores pucker and the minute hairs on her arms rise in the breeze.

  “Excuse me, would you mind not breathing on me?” she told him, without turning from her companion.

  “Would you like me to hold my breath for you instead?” he asked, taking a sip of the irila and smiling a smutty smile.

  She raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow and turned her huge green eyes on him.

  “Who are you? Do you know who’s skin you’re making crawl?” she looked disdainfully at him, and turned from the squirming, scaled and intertwined x’thalian conscioform that she had been speaking to, excusing herself with a roll of her eyes, as if to say ‘look at what I have to deal with…’

  Kyle looked down his nose at her companion. She must be desperate, he thought. Look at the company she keeps. He congratulated himself mentally on an easy catch.

  “Tribal tribulations, eh, Curator?” The tangled x’thalian thought to her.

  “Be thankful you haven’t got breasts, Y’mal,” she replied in her mind and it left laughing, an undulation where the x’thalian’s nerve core, its emotional centre, flickered.

  “I was hoping you’d enlighten me,” said Kyle, unaware of the exchange.

  Orpal hissed at Kyle, “For God’s sake man, have you never been to a function before that didn’t revolve around a skinning!?”

  “Shut up, damn it,” Kyle thought at Orpal, “I think she likes me.”

  Orpal bashed his head against himself. “Of course she does. Go ahead. Don’t mind me. Not like we’re busy…”

  Kyle tapped his ear.

  The woman laughed. He noted her teeth, slightly sharper than was entirely necessary for processed foods. “I am the Curator, and I believe the process of enlightenment took several million years for higher species alone. You, sweety, no doubt struggle to count to three.”

  She had the look of a hunter herself. He was intrigued and stood gawping just long enough for her to say, “Ah, a tribal?”

  Then he just felt the childish self-enforced certainty that this wasn’t going well, and was unlikely to improve in the near future. Kyle may not have been the brightest sun in the galaxy but where his mind failed him his senses took up the slack.

  She took in his scarred left arm, sticking out from his robe, and the bulge under his right. Her tongue flicked over her lips (a gesture which got Kyle’s attention back on track), and ran the tip of a slender finger around her glass.

  What was he thinking anyway, he chided himself. He looked down at the ambassadorial dress Orpal had chosen for him this evening, his arm bare and the rest of the outfit too tight across the shoulder and slack around the waist, designed as it was for people who attended galaxiries and ate too much.

  While he was thinking of a witty retort (which he had been since the start of the conversation), she patted him, annoyingly, on his reddening cheek.

  “There, there,” she said, “Higher life had to start somewhere, sweety,” and left.

  Kyle’s mind was still (barely) ticking over.

  *

  Kyle stumbled like a verbal dummy and left the room, the woman watching his back with a smirk, Orpal laughing at him through the eargen. Kyle took it out and threw it into the disposal unit as he passed.

  He stopped to see where he was, then stepped back, rummaged through the rubbish compactor and put the eargen back in again.

  Orpal beamed into the eargen. “Kyle, stop being a tit. Did you forget why you’re here? Aboard Cablas? Where the second piece of the emitter is?”

  “I know that, Orpal! You know, you could help. I’m the one’s that’s doing all the work here.”

  “Well, if I did all the wor
k, it wouldn’t be payment, would it?”

  “I’m beginning to think I got shafted. You’re not going to tell me you count thinking as work, are you?” The walkways were clear. “It’s not like I give a toss about it either way.”

  Orpal groaned in Kyle’s head. “Do you realise how important this is? It could push the next stage of evolution, Kyle, the most important one – understanding where we all came from, why we’re here…” The murmur of astounded patrons was fading behind him. There was no one else in the corridor.

  “Alright, alright…and no, I don’t realise how important it is, because you’ve never told me why I’m poncing about collecting some archeo-art that doesn’t do anything and that, by your own account, hasn’t even got it’s shit together. So basically, we’re talking about some really old broken thing, and from the part I’ve seen so far I wouldn’t want it in my collection.”

  “You haven’t got a collection, Kyle, and I’m sure if you had, it’d involve far more horns than is tastefully in well-meaning society.”

  Kyle’s booted feet stomped along the artery, his dress tails swishing. He had no idea where he was going but the eargen flashed at him when he went the wrong way. He was beginning to get annoyed. A whirring hum was growing from under his right sleeve.

  “Yeah, well, there’s art in horns. Anyway… why do you need to change society then? You yourself said that society is in an enlightened stage, that we have eradicated need and want. Our society is peaceful, is it not?”

  “Well, yes, that too is true. Yet for it to live it must change. This is also the nature of things. Without change we will become stagnant and die. This is true. Humans are like locusts in peace and in battle – they destroy everything that comes before. They still do this, despite the enlightenment. The next stage of evolution must be to drive them toward symbiosis. We, the robot factions too, must exist in peace not just with other species, but with the gel, the dust, of life itself. In the grand scheme we do not make any impact on the universe – the universe would shrug us off were we to destroy a planet, even a whole solar system. But now we have that power there is greater responsibility. It is time for us to truly become gods. This is the power of ancient fable. But when the fables say the gods were whimsical they were talking about us, not gods. It is time for us to realise our potential. It is time for us to become the true stewards of this plane. We have a chance for greatness. Even the thought itself is proof of the possibility...”